


running with scissors

by Verbyna



Series: verse, chorus, verse [1]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Music, Canon Bisexual Character, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Polyamorous Character, now with extra tour buses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-14
Updated: 2017-03-14
Packaged: 2018-10-04 21:46:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10290824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/pseuds/Verbyna
Summary: It’s hard to be the thing he wants. It’s even harder when he doesn’t look at her like she’s a thing, when his hands grip her thighs like the edges of a pedestal so he can bring her down to his level. When he decides to remind her that the thing between them isn’t hunger, isn’t sweet, isn’t avoidable.Charles gets to see her. She regrets a lot of things, but not that. God help her, not that.





	

**Author's Note:**

> part of a larger music scene series that i'm panic-writing to cope with the end of the show. come cry with me on tumblr @ soundslikepenance

“Don’t be a child, Charles,” Eleanor says, and the room holds its breath. 

There is a wealth of shit he could throw in her face right now. Starting with the fact that she’s barely twenty-three, that she was _an actual child_ when they first met, that she locked him out of a venue just last week for doing something that was, in retrospect, in his nature to do, which she knew from the start, and still expected him to stand down from. Because she said so.

But instead of saying anything, he just looks at her. Out of the corner of her eye she can see Jack pulling Annie away from the blast radius; directly behind Charles, Silver is trying to do the same with Flint. She couldn’t break eye contact with Charles right now any more than she could turn away from an incoming train, so she doesn’t even try. She looks right back, breathing hard. And then he smiles at her.

“Give us the room,” he says. He couldn’t possibly know she shivered, but his eyes flick down to her shoulders anyway, to her chest, lower. “Flint. The room, if you will.”

“Jesus _fuck_ ,” Flint spits, but to his credit, he leaves.

When Charles walks over to her, she stands her ground. He’s still smiling and it’s driving her up the fucking wall; she’s right, she knows she’s right, but he knows _why_ she thinks she’s right, and he still disagrees. It’s all there on his face. 

She leans back on her desk when he’s in touching distance. He doesn’t stop until he’s standing between her legs, then leans forward, bracketing her with his arms.

“Don’t be a fucking child,” she repeats, and then he’s on her.

It’s sweet whenever she lets it be. But she doesn’t want sweet, and she’s so angry she forgets what she was angry about, so she limps out twenty minutes later with strands of his hair still cutting off the circulation in her fingers.

Then her father goes over her head and approves the tour anyway. 

 

+

 

No one bats an eye when Eleanor follows Charles out of his house, suitcase in tow, a pair of his old sunglasses between her bloodshot eyes and the sunrise glare glinting off the bus. Charles nods at the driver when he opens the sides up for the luggage, stowes his, and walks around to the door, letting her heave two months’ worth of her own shit up to stowe it.

It only placates her a little. It also reminds her that she almost pulled her back trying to keep up with him last night, which is fucking ridiculous after six years of sleeping with someone.

Eleanor takes a moment to listen to the engine and breathe deeply through her headache. She should be in her office, or with the label’s lawyers, sorting through the inexhaustible legal nightmare that comes with managing these fuckups. She should be _anywhere but here_ for the next eight weeks, but it’s her job to make money and keep them coherent enough to function in front of paying audiences. To keep Charles fucking Vane from going off the rails and taking them all down with him, unless Flint does it first.

Charles is already partaking of the booze in the kitchenette cupboard when she climbs aboard. “Jack and Anne are in the back. Wouldn’t go there. Hair of the dog?” he asks, openly amused at her involuntary grimace.

“That’s not what bit me,” she says, fighting down a fresh swell of nausea. She just wants to sleep. Just sleep for a couple of hours, because she’s been drinking for so long that the hangover caught up with her, and she still hasn’t cleared the rider with the venue tonight but it can wait that long. Just sleep and--

He lifts his arm and tilts his head in invitation. She sighs and sits down, pressed up against him ankle to shoulder, and puts her phone next to his bottle on the tiny table. He doesn’t pull her in, just rubs her arm and waits for her to make up her mind about joining.

“Fuck,” she groans, five miles down the road. He has the gall to laugh; her heart has the gall to skip. “Give me that, and tell me how the fuck Flint got you to agree to this circus.”

Charles passes her his glass, takes a swig from the bottle, and tells her a story about one of his first gigs opening for Teach instead. She doesn’t remember falling asleep, nor does she have the energy to curse him when she scrolls through the ten urgent emails on her phone when she wakes up in his bunk around noon.

Jack Rackham somehow gets his pre-show massage anyway.

 

+

 

This is the part Eleanor doesn’t try explaining to herself: when Charles is onstage, when he’s lit up and vicious and trying to wake those kids up to things they’d rather not see, she wants him and hates him so much that her teeth ache with it.

She doesn’t disagree with him, but principles are so far from reality. Charles makes her forget that as easily as he makes the kids forget they have a curfew, or college debt, or rational reasons not to get arrested at a rally. Every time he performs, she feels guilty for believing him and guilty that she doesn’t. Guilty for letting herself be swayed, and guilty that he thinks she’d stay that way if he tried hard enough.

And he always looks for her when he sings _that_ song, finds her unerringly in the sidestage crowd even with the lights in his eyes. Reminds her, despite herself, of being thirteen and watching her future unfold in front of her; just like that, sidestage with her father, watching Charles Vane snarl at a crowd and softening when they locked eyes.

She’s been waiting to break his heart for ten years now. And it’s funny, when she’s drunk enough to laugh about it, that the whole world thinks he’s unbreakable. It’s funny how they don’t understand the most basic truth at the heart of him: he was broken from the start, and he gave someone the power to scatter the pieces.

Charles Vane, for all he sings about freedom, doesn’t know how to fight back against her.

And still, she can’t look away from him. She believes him, and wants him, and hates him, and lives with it.

 

+

 

Two weeks into the tour, while she’s bailing Anne and Jack out after a bar fight, Charles brings two girls to their hotel room. Eleanor finds them sprawled across the bed, her lube and his condoms spread across the sheets as clear as evidence in a crime scene photo.

The girls don’t even look at her. Charles tilts his head up and watches her from under his lashes, calm and sated and somehow hungry, all at the same time.

Eleanor rubs her eyes, then digs through her overstuffed bag for the NDA folder. _Have they?_ she mouths, brandishing the envelope, and gets a pen when she shakes his head.

“Ladies, Mr. Vane needs his rest.” The girls jump and start to pull the topsheet over themselves. Charles, being Charles, extricates himself from the center of the pile and goes to the mini-fridge, naked and horribly attractive. He winks at Eleanor on the way, and she manages to roll her eyes instead of getting sidetracked.

“There’s just some stuff we need to go through first. Have you taken any photos or video?” They both shake their heads, and Eleanor lets it go. There are too many pictures of his dick online to throw a stone here. “Okay, that’s good. I just need you to sign this. It’s an agreement that you won’t discuss whatever just happened with Mr. Vane, generally or specifically. Read it, then I’ll walk you through signing. Charles, if you will?”

She hands him the papers, accepts the glass he’s holding out, and goes to turn on the TV while she checks for reports of Anne and Jack’s arrest on her phone. When the girls are dressed, she gets the papers in order, then puts them back in her bag while Charles kisses them goodbye.

“Where were you?” he asks, lying back on the bed with his arms crossed behind his head.

Eleanor glares at him before she toes off her shoes and sits down next to him, handing him the glass. “You’re supposed to get the papers before any clothes come off,” she says, knowing it’s a lost cause. She lets him help her out of her jacket, though, rolling her shoulders as the leather slips off. He hums and bites gently at the back of her neck, over the awful skull tattoo he dared her to get before he ever got into her pants. 

“They came off in the elevator. I didn’t have a pen. Where were you?”

He pulls her back and she lets herself fall across his lap, groaning in mixed relief and frustration. “I was bailing out the terrible two.”

“Flint and Silver?”

She rolls her eyes, ignoring the dread that those names dredge up when there’s an ‘and’ between them through long practice. “Anne and Rackham. She broke someone’s nose and he got in the middle of it, and then she had to break more shit.”

“Good,” Charles says, with a note of finality.

Eleanor disagrees, but lets it drop. He smells so good - her shampoo and fresh sweat and pussy and that ever-changing, recognizable tour mix of hotel toiletries and grime. He smells so good that her plans fly right out the window, but she can’t let them go without poking at him.

“If you’re tired, I can sleep in Max’s room tonight. I left her in the middle of something.”

She has time to breathe in before he lifts her torso off his legs, flips her over, and straddles her thighs. He bends down to push her hair off her face before dragging his fingers down her spine to the top of her pants.

“I’m not tired,” he growls in her ear, pulling her pants down over the swell of her ass very, very slowly. She closes her eyes and lifts her hips as best she can. “You’re staying with me.”

If she said no, he’d climb off and let her go to Max. He would do it without complaint, because he is a lot of things but a hypocrite is not one of them, and she would shower and put on a robe and walk down the hall to Max’s room. She has a keycard. Max slid it into her pocket when she got Jack’s call.

Charles would let her go, but Eleanor has been fighting for his people for three hours, and she wants something back.

“Make it worth my while,” she says, and reaches back to push his head where she wants it. She rolls over again to spread her legs over his shoulders, but has to close her eyes against the look he’s leveling her with.

It’s hard, she thinks, to be the thing he wants. It’s even harder when he doesn’t look at her like she’s a thing, when his hands grip her thighs like the edges of a pedestal so he can bring her down to his level. When he decides to remind her that the thing between them isn’t hunger, isn’t sweet, isn’t avoidable.

Charles gets to see her. She regrets a lot of things, but not that. God help her, not that.

 

+

 

She and Max don’t kiss. It doesn’t bother her.

It should, probably. But it doesn’t. It’s the easiest part of her life.

 

+

 

A month into the tour, on a narrow beach somewhere off the PCH, Flint corners Eleanor for one of his rare chats. They built a fire and Silver is skinny-dipping with a couple of techs, which is probably why Flint shifted his focus to her. He’s still in his gig leathers, boots rolled up over his trousers, like a poster she might’ve put on her wall if she were anyone else.

“I still don’t know why you agreed to this,” he says without preamble. 

She’s been watching Charles as Flint approached. Trying to see him as he is, divorce him from the icon, but just like Flint, there is no difference. Not like Jack, who has to work for it, or Silver, who has to act. When she looks up at Flint, she feels both trapped and chosen. It’s a familiar feeling, and she resents it.

“I haven’t agreed to anything. I’m here because it’s my job.”

He sits down next to her, makes himself comfortable against the rock at his back. He’s known her long enough to avoid her eyes when he tries to pick her apart.

“We should’ve probably had this conversation a long time ago,” he says.

“How long is that?”

He glances at Silver, so she glances at Charles. Here’s another thing she doesn’t try explaining: whatever this fever is that has her in its grip, she never felt alone in it. Mr. Scott and his wife were always there, and Charles laid his heart at her feet before she had time to consider healthier options. She met Jack and Anne when she was fifteen, living in a house built on Flint’s grief.

She knows that walking away is not an option, more than most people do. Even if she doesn’t let herself be in love, even if she fights it so hard that the fight is as large a part of her as her ambition is, it doesn’t mean she’s ever blind to the irrational things people will do for the sake of one another.

How long is a long time to ignore what’s coming?

“A year ago, I laid down the foundations for a label,” says Flint. “Just the core group. When I approached Vane, he wanted a trial period.”

“This tour.”

“This tour,” Flint confirms. “All of us on the road, and you managing it. He didn’t tell you.”

Eleanor shakes her head, watches the fire. Tries to think, but her mind has been made up for too long to waver. All it does is recoil, then circle the implications, the changes in her plans.

“We own your songs, James. The label owns them. The shortest contract on this whole fucking beach is another album and a tour. You’re down for three of each. So I must ask, respectfully, what the fuck?”

“That’s for anything under our own names. None of us are so attached to those as to ignore the possiblities here. Are you?”

Freedom, she thinks. Freedom and Charles and Max and no long shadow of her father hanging over her, making her look weak just because she’s someone’s daughter. She did this before, though the scale was modest, and she only had Charles with her. And she can see it now, what she could do if she just stopped pandering, what they could all do if they put aside their differences and united against a common enemy.

The enemy looks a lot like her, but that’s just the way things are.

She says, “Let me think about it.”

 

+

 

Over the next two weeks, she waits for Charles to give some sort of sign that he knows about the talk with Flint. Flint would’ve told him, she’s sure, but Charles acts the same as he always has. If he’d fucked more people, she’d at least have more data, but those girls were his tour allowance and he hasn’t let his eyes roam since.

She thinks about it so much that she only wants to let it go at the end of the day. His hands and mouth on her, his cock, the way he gently strokes her face before grabbing her hair from behind and making her arch her back so he’ll bring her off: simple, familiar motions, welcome distractions giving nothing away.

“Do you want out?” she asks eventually. They’re wrapped in the sheets in yet another hotel room, due to fly home in the morning. Her head is resting on his chest, his arms are around her without holding her, and she _knows_ this man. Knows him like a rock knows the well it was dropped into. Like the sand knows salt.

He stills, then asks, “Do you remember our first time?” He waits for her nod. It takes a while, but he’s patient here, if nowhere else. “You were seventeen. I thought I was done for.”

It was her first time. And it wasn’t about her; not really, not even at the time. She took what he was offering, and whatever she gave in return, she came out the other side ready to take on the world. She would’ve gotten there eventually. He’s the one who needed something to fight for.

“You have the connections to make this easy. Flint and Silver are insane, but it can work.” He pulls back to watch her face when he asks, “Do you trust me?”

All she sees is love layered over old fear, old resentment. No, she doesn’t trust him with anything past being true to himself. But maybe--

“Pour me a drink. Bring the bottle. We’re getting out, and I need to plan.”

He kisses her before he gets up, and it’s very sweet.

She lets him go.


End file.
